Mitchell Wins Pulitzer for Gone with the Wind
Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction on May 3, 1937, just eleven months after its publication. The novel had sold one million copies in its first six months, a record at the time. Mitchell spent ten years writing the 1,037-page epic about Scarlett O'Hara and the destruction of the plantation South during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The 1939 film adaptation, starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, became the highest-grossing movie ever made (adjusted for inflation, it still holds that record). The novel has been both celebrated as a sweeping historical romance and criticized for its romanticized portrayal of slavery and the antebellum South, with its depiction of enslaved people as loyal and content drawing particular condemnation.
May 3, 1937
89 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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